Tag Archives: carbonfarming

Connor Stedman, consultant and designer for AppleSeed Permaculture, will lead a pre-conference intensive at NOFA’s Summer Conference. He will be providing an overview of farming practices that can help stabilize the global climate by sequestering atmospheric carbon in soil and perennial plants.This will be the forty-first annual Summer Conference and will be held from August 14-16 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Are you interested in finding a piece of land to steward, manage, farm on and grow with for the next 1-10 years? Would you like to start an agricultural enterprise or educational farm without the challenges of purchasing land? Appleseed Permaculture is glad to announce our new project, AppleSeed Land Managers.

We match land owners (individuals, families, land trusts, retreat centers, schools, companies etc.) who want to

Grow food

Build community

Regenerate their local ecosystems

With land managers (individuals, couples, and families) who want to

Grow food, community, & local ecosystems

Build their skills and experience with land management & eco-agricultural enterprises

Develop long-term relationships with the land and local professional network

Essentially, we build symbiotic relationships that put people on the land and generate multiple forms of capital for everyone involved. Land managers will receive compensation for their services, and land owners will achieve returns on their investments in financial, material, living, social, or cultural forms of capital. We are building this match-making service to meet the parallel unmet needs we’ve encountered among our design clients, our students, and our colleagues in the permaculture and organic farming communities. We invite you to be among the first people who try a new approach to meeting property management and development needs by engaging in the AppleSeed Land Managers process.

The types of people we’d like to engage as land managers are bright eyed, bushy-tailed, self-starter, situationally aware, go-get-‘em, positive, grateful, dependable, perseverant, clear-communicating, whole-systems thinking, and committed to personal growth and development. They have specific experience in permaculture, organic farming, or social entreprenurship. As of Spring 2012, we are looking to find one couple or family and two individuals (one farmer and one farm educator) to fill specific positions in the northeast USA.

Here’s what will happen if you meet the criteria above and would like to get involved:

You submit a resume and online application

We conduct a preliminary phone interview with you

We conduct an in-person interview with you

We invite you to join Appleseed Permaculture for trial work day(s)

We give you specific feedback and ask you to re-apply in the future

OR

We invite you to join our Land Managers Network!

Once you’re fully enrolled in our network, we will work with you to discover and outline your specific wants and preferences regarding land and a relationship with a land owner. From then on, we will pursue contacts with land owners on your behalf until we find a prospective match for you! Finally, we will support you in the process of forming new relationships with the land and the land owners. This includes:

Understanding and developing a well-articulated vision and plan for the land

Business planning for eco-agricultural enterprises

Creating clear written legal agreements between land owners and land managers

Receiving continued mentoring from AppleSeed Permaculture staff

As the first wave of applicants to our Land Managers Network, you’ll have the opportunity to help us streamline and grow our new process.

We look forward to meeting you and networking on your behalf,The Appleseed Team

Every time Benneth Phelps (Mosaic Farm) and I prepare to give this talk (this time at the 2010 Northeastern Organic Farm Association Summer Conference) we end up tearing it apart and redesigning it completely. Here’s a sample polyculture from the talk:

This time, Benneth drew on her recent experience creating a complete business plan for her venture Mosaic Farm in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachussets. We articulated a new design permaculture process for farmers, who need to focus on specific marketable crops along with the larger landscape patterns necessary to support and maintain them.

Permaculture designers: It’s time to get serious about profitability.Farmers & Greenhorns: You already know what I’m talking about.

I’ve been working on an integrated ecological farm design for the Ashokan Center in the Hudson River Valley bioregion. The design calls for a mega-diversity of organic enterprises: Multi-species rotational grazing, hardy kiwi vineyards, mixed-fruit orchards, agroforestry & silvopasture, no-till & greenhouse vegetables, gourmet & medicinal mushrooms, and more. There are 200+ edible & useful species spread across 13 acres of farm and 200+ acres of forest.

But to start an ecological farm (in the USA at this point in time) takes money. In order to justify the up-front capital expense that my clients will have to invest to get this farm going, I need to be able to show them that this mega-diverse permaculture system can be profitable.

How can I do it? How can I predict the potential expenses, and calculate the possible profits? What can I show my clients to convince them that all of these great permaculture ideas make good economic sense?

By using Enterprise Budgets.

Enterprise budgets are summaries of actual data on the costs and yields of growing a particular crop — from asparagus to tilapia to black currants to walnuts to cattle to shitake mushrooms. The basic pattern is as follows:

For example, download a simple Bell Pepper Enterprise Budget from Penn State here and take a look.

As you move into perennial crops (like this pear example), the enterprise budgets get a bit more complex. AND, there are currently very few enterprise budgets that focus on small-scale, organic and post-organic permaculture enterprises. So we’ll need to develop based on the small-scale enterprises we initiate — this means learning the basics of good bookkeeping and accounting, and keeping good records on our expenses and yields. Some of the best current documentation on this scale comes from Joe Kovach at Ohio State University – take a look at his work here.

In Kirk Gadzia’s Holistic Management module during the Carbon Farming Course, our financial planning exercise (which you can read about over at the Carbon Farming Course blog here) focused on choosing agricultural enterprises to re-invigorate an ailing farm. To bring the whole-systems thinking of permaculture into play, I needed to propose viable multi-functional alternatives to the simple and unprofitable hay production. Fortunately, I’ve been collecting every single enterprise budget available on the web for the last year — so I had many options, from seaberry & hazelnut orchards to perch & bullhead catfish aquaculture. (The systematic collation and organization of all these budgets creates the backbone of the economic design tool for ecological agriculture enterprises I blogged about here.)

In order to support the ongoing development of ecological agriculture, I’m making available to you all the all the enterprise budgets I have collected in the last 2 years – more than 1090 of them. I ask only that you keep seeking and creating out new budgets to add to the collection – especially ones that use real data from small-scale organic and permaculture operations. Download ’em here – careful, this is a 130mb file.

Any questions?

Permies, are you ready to get realistic about profitability? Let’s get this sort of economic sensibility into our designs.

Farmers & Greenhorns, how can I make this information more available and useful to you?